1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to communication systems, and in particular, to reducing latency in transceivers.
2. Background Art
Communication systems for transmitting data may operate according to a number of standards and implementations. Such communication systems may include one or more communication channels for transmitting and receiving data. Some of such communication channels may include a transceiver that receives serial data, converts the serial data to parallel data, digitally processes the parallel data, serializes the processed data, and transmits the serialized data. Such a transceiver may be referred to as a SERDES (serializer/deserializer) transceiver. SERDES transceivers may be used in a wide range of communication systems and devices, such as mobile devices, desktop computers and servers, computer networks, and telecommunication networks.
A SERDES transceiver may be capable of handling very high data rates. For instance, a multi-gigabit SERDES transceiver may be capable of receiving an analog serial data stream at data rates over 1 Gigabit-per-second. Multi-gigabit transceivers are used increasingly for data communications because they can be used over longer distances and use fewer wires.
One disadvantage with multi-gigabit transceivers, however, is that they suffer from high latency due to the fact that the incoming high speed signal has to go through many stages of de-serialization to reduce the data rate to be low enough for the digital processing that occurs within the SERDES. For example, a multi-gigabit transceiver receiving an analog serial data stream at 10 Gigabits-per-second is typically de-serialized down to parallel data at 500 Megabits-per-second. In other words, the analog serial data stream is de-serialized at a ratio of 1:20. For multi-gigabit transceivers receiving an analog serial data stream at even faster rates, the ratio increases (e.g., to 1:32, 1:64). This high latency becomes an ever-increasing problem as the market demands increasingly higher data rates.